I'm the Chief Growth Officer at Prophet, where I've been a senior partner since 2000, helping clients as diverse as GE, Johnson & Johnson, Walgreens, State Farm and United Airlines win in the marketplace. I also spent 12 years at innovation/brand consultancy Kuczmarski & Associates, where I founded the Brand Asset Management practice. And prior to K&A, I worked at Procter & Gamble and focused on a number of top global brands. As this blog attests, I have opinions and a perspective that I'm not shy about sharing. What's endlessly fascinating to me is not just the ways marketing, brand and business strategies can come together in winning combinations, but how the human factor (let's talk the CMO) makes it all work ­ or not. That's led to numerous articles and several well-received books, including my most recent, "The Shift: The Transformation of Today's Marketers into Tomorrow's Growth Drivers." It's all about the conversation - comment or feel free to email me directly at sdavis@prophet.com.

Change Afoot at Change.org: How Altering an Ad Policy Alters a Brand Positioning

Since its 2007 launch it has served as a “social action” platform to empower and enable everyday people (over 20 million members in 196 countries) to bring attention to and rally support for their causes. TIME magazine named its founder and CEO Ben Rattray as one of this year’s 100 most influential people. And it actually does well with its do-good mission: This year’s revenues reportedly are running at the $16 million mark.

That positioning has also been reinforced in its business practices: Its advertising policy has been values-based, and Change.org only accepted advertising from progressive organizations that shared its values.

The business (a for-profit, despite the connotations of the “.org”) has successfully established what its brand stands for and has consistently lived up to it. The payoff has been a growing community built around the brand promise by supporters who have a strong sense of ownership in Change.org and how it delivers.

But it’s only now getting a small taste of the backlash that can occur when you tinker with your brand positioning in a way that goes counter to expectations.

Change.org very quietly changed its advertising policy several weeks ago. According to leaked internal documents making their way to Huffington Post, the new policy now has the organization accept advertising “based on the content of the ad, not the group doing the advertising.”

That opens the door, according to the FAQ cited in the article, to advertising against abortion, for guns and for union-busting. As the answer put it: “We are open to organizations that represent all points of view, including those with which we personally (and strongly) disagree.”

The move has its basis in the company’s decision earlier this year to partner with the anti-labor education reformer Michelle Rhee’s Students First. (Change.org’s advertising model charges groups to sponsor and match petitions to users whose interests align with the cause.) Pressure from its community base, including a strong labor faction, led to Rhee’s group and another being dropped, although both still use the site for non-sponsored petitions.

Right now, the reaction to Change.org’s change in ad policy has been muted. Mainstream media hasn’t paid much attention. Its Facebook page has a flurry of comments, largely negative.

It will be interesting to monitor how Change.org proceeds in the future in accepting advertisers whose presence may well pose a disconnect with how its community perceives its brand. The litmus test, the company reportedly said, will be whether Google – whose open platform it seeks to emulate – would take on the same progressive-repellent advertisers.

That’s all well and good, except for this. Google is at its core a search engine. Its brand positioning centers on how efficiently and creatively it helps people find stuff (and helps stuff be found) on the Web. It and Change.org, an enabler of social change, aren’t really in the same ballpark. Google may not be the best role model it could have chosen.

It will probably take a more egregious departure from its roots than Michelle Rhee to cause Change.org substantial harm. Here’s hoping the company keeps in mind, however, that for all the power of a strong brand, its mishandling can cause substantial damage. Look no further than the Susan B. Komen Foundation for a case in point.

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